OS X Terminal UTF-8 issues

Question

Okay  so I finally got myself a MacBook Air after 15 years of linux  And before I got it my big concern was UTF-8 support because no matter if I get files sent to me from windows or mac-clients theres always issues with encoding  while on ubuntu I can be sure that all output no matter what program will produce perfect utf-8 encoded data   And now on my second day  today  with OS X Im tearing my hair of by frustration  Why   When I open Nano and type some swedish characters like        in it  it puts out blank characters at the end of the line  which i guess is the other byte in each character   When I open python and try using swedish characters  it does not output anything at all  When I connect to a Ubuntu server trough SSH I cant type        in bash  tough it works in VIM  still trough SSH   And in nano backspace does not work  but if check the box  Delete sends ctrl H  in the Terminal preferences  backspace starts working in nano but stops working in VIM   I ve tried unchecking all other encodings then UTF-8 in terminal preferences but that does not seem to work either   I m sure that every non US-person must have the same issues  so hove do I fix them  I just want full UTF-8 support

User · Answer

Go to Terminal - gt  Preferences - gt  Advanced  Tab  go down to International and select Unicode  UTF-8  as Character Encoding   And tick Set locale environment variables on startup

User · Answer

Since nano is a terminal application  I guess it s more a terminal problem than a nano problem   I met similar problems at OS X  I cannot input and view the Chinese characters at terminal    I tried tweaking the system setting through OS X UI whose real effect is change the environment variable LANG   So finally I just add some stuff into the    bashrc to fix the problem     I m Chinese and I prefer English manual export LC COLLATE  zh CN UTF-8  export LC CTYPE  zh CN UTF-8  export LC MESSAGES  en US UTF-8  export LC MONETARY  zh CN UTF-8  export LC NUMERIC  zh CN UTF-8  export LC TIME  zh CN UTF-8    BTW  don t set LC ALL which will override all the other LC   settings

User · Answer

Check whether nano was actually built with UTF-8 support  using nano --version  Here it is on Cygwin   nano --version  GNU nano version 2 2 5  compiled 21 04 20  Nov  3 2010    C  1999  2000  2001  2002  2003  2004  2005  2006  2007   2008  2009 Free Software Foundation  Inc   Email  nano nano-editor org    Web  http   www nano-editor org   Compiled options  --enable-color --enable-extra --enable-multibuffer  --enable-nanorc --enable-utf8   Note the last bit

User · Answer

To make nano work as you want it to  try   export LANG  UTF-8    Or get a newer version of nano via MacPorts     cf  http   www macports org install php port info nano port variants nano sudo port install nano  utf8  color  no wrap   With respect to ssh  amp  UTF-8 issues comment out SendEnv LANG LC   in   etc ssh config   See  Terminal in OS X Lion  can t write        on remote machine

User · Answer

The following is a summary of what you need to do under OS X Mavericks  10 9   This is all summarized in  http   hints macworld com article php story 20060825071728278   Go to Terminal- Preferences- Settings- Advanced   Under International  make sure the character encoding is set to Unicode  UTF-8    Also  and this is key  under Emulation  make sure that Escape non-ASCII input with Control-V is unchecked  i e  is not set    These two settings fix things for Terminal  Make sure your locale is set to something that ends in  UTF-8  Type locale and look at the LC CTYPE line  If it doesn t say something like en US UTF-8  the stuff before the dot might change if you are using a non-US-English locale   then in your Bash  profile or  bashrc in your home directory  add a line like this   export LC CTYPE en US UTF-8   This will fix things for command-line programs in general  Add the following lines to  inputrc in your home directory  create it if necessary    set meta-flag on set input-meta on set output-meta on set convert-meta off   This makes Bash be eight-bit clean  so it will pass UTF-8 characters in and out without messing with them    Keep in mind you will have to restart Bash  e g  close and reopen the Terminal window  to get it to pay attention to all the settings you make in 2 and 3 above

User · Answer

Try   Having a Powerline compatible font installed https   github com powerline fonts Setting these ENV vars in  zshrc or  bashrc     LANG  en US UTF-8  LC COLLATE  en US UTF-8  LC CTYPE  en US UTF-8  LC MESSAGES  en US UTF-8  LC MONETARY  en US UTF-8  LC NUMERIC  en US UTF-8  LC TIME  en US UTF-8  LC ALL  en US UTF-8

User · Answer

Unfortunately  the Preferences dialog is not always very helpful  but by tweaking around you should be able to get everything working    To be able to type Swedish characters in Terminal  add the following lines to your    inputrc  most likely you must create this file    set input-meta on set output-meta on set convert-meta off   This should do the work both with utf8 and other codings in bash  nano and many other programs  Some programs  like tmux  also depends on the locale  Then  adding for instance export LC ALL en US UTF-8 to your    profile file should help  but keep in mind that a few  mainly obscure  programs require a standard locale  so if you have trouble running or compiling a program  try going back to LC ALL C   Some references that may be helpful    http   homepage mac com thgewecke mlingos9 html unicode http   hints macworld com article php story 20060825071728278

User · Answer

My terminal was just acting silly  not printing out         I found  and set  this setting    Under Terminal - gt  Preferences    - gt  Profiles - gt  Advanced   Seems to have fixed my problem

User · Answer

For me  this helped  I checked locale on my local shell in terminal    locale LANG  cs CZ UTF-8  LC COLLATE  cs CZ UTF-8    Then connected to any remote host I am using via ssh and edited file  etc profile as root - at the end I added line   export LANG cs CZ UTF-8   After next connection it works fine in bash  ls and nano

User · Answer

Short versatile answer  fits to other national languages  even Lithuanian or Russian    open Terminal edit  profile in home directory - nano  profile or in Catalina or newer nano  zshenv add line export LC ALL en US UTF-8 press Ctrl x and Y  exit and save    This solved for me even small country rare national characters  You may need to close and open Terminal to make changes effective   Also if you like Linux behavior  use lot of Alt shortcuts like Alt   or Alt   in mc  then you should disable Mac style Option key function  Terminal- Preferences- Profiles- Keyboard and check box  Use Option as Meta key

User · Answer

In my case  simply using the uxterm command instead of xterm solved the problem   It s available in  opt X11 bin uxterm by installing the XQuartz package provided by Apple

[macos] OS X Terminal UTF-8 issues

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